


Sin

by murakistags



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon - TV, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Flashbacks, Friendship, Hannibal is a Cannibal, Off-screen Relationship(s), Past Relationship(s), Pre-Canon, Pre-Series, Psychological Drama, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-03 15:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8719099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murakistags/pseuds/murakistags
Summary: A look into the complex relationship between Bedelia Du Maurier and Hannibal Lecter, from when they first met, to the present.Pre-Series (Head)Canon and Mid-Series Canon, Seasons 1-3. Finale post-credit spoilers.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MaddyHughes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaddyHughes/gifts).



> I've been recently writing in the mind of Bedelia over on the Twitter sphere...especially with one amazingly well-written Hannibal, AKA MaddyHughes. They've been fueling my muse immensely. Also: I'm a big huge nerd for beautiful Bluebeard's Wife aesthetics, especially with how elegant and lovely Bedelia and Hannibal are in S3.
> 
> Not beta-read. Apologies for any mistakes!
> 
> Bon appétit.

 

 

 

English is Bedelia's native language. French is her fluent second, spoken within her extended overseas household, compulsory and studied intensely throughout primary and secondary school. Italian is a shaky third language, one that is unlocked to her only by her own travels to the Mediterranean peninsula, and by old pages of two textbooks now forgotten and collecting dust on her home office's shelf. Spanish is a fourth language that she mostly understands readily, but does not speak. Bedelia knows as much Latin as any licensed doctor of medicine must know, attenuated by her knowledge of other tongues. Even so, Bedelia does not consider herself a bilingual, or even a trilingual, and most certainly nothing remotely close to a polyglot. She merely considers herself very capable of verbal and written communication, and with the ability to express in one tongue, what cannot be so accurately expressed in another. It is less about language to her, as it is concerning the ability to understand and speak on a most basic human level.

 

Hannibal Lecter, when he comes to her for the first time, knows that she is capable of forming a number of different and coherent speech patterns. It is listed with her medical credentials and research, and any person literate with access to the internet can easily find such information. He must know, for he greets her with a dulcet French and the most handsome smile and politeness she has witnessed since her Birmingham beau nearly two decades prior.

_"Bonsoir, Dr Du Maurier."_

_"...Bonsoir."_

 

It was enough to tickle her fancy on first impression. Not so much to blind her, but enough to make her smile with all of her pearly teeth, and kindly welcome him into her practice. The most vicious and feral of monsters sway to and fro with delicate understanding, waltz among the innocent with a keen understanding of the music beyond what simple notes and rests are written on the staves. Bedelia was never under the guise that she herself is an innocent, in any sense of the word. Catholic primary school had taught her even the thought of sin is to be sinful, so that every human should live in a constant God-fearing state of seeking forgiveness. Even seeking forgiveness from sin one has yet to commit. Here, she welcomes the very Devil himself to her breast. Is that itself to be considered a sin, or is it merely accepting the inevitability of sin?

 

Bedelia is not an overly religious woman. When one considers the terse upbringing alongside thick textbooks and nuns and yardsticks, even Bedelia has surprised herself in how far from the straight she has swayed. The Catholic Church exerted enough influence to assure her of the existence of a higher being, God. Beyond that, she is not convinced of His existence on earth. When every person is but one miniature speck, their actions a minute smudge on this life, what benefit does an omnipotent being derive from paying each one any mind? Nothing, and everything.

 

She likes to consider, from time to time, how her version of omnibenevolence might be icy eyes looking down from the heavens, leaving a thick layer of frost on even the richest soil, and watching how the humans scatter and freeze to death, scramble to devise a plan of saving one another in the sub-zero degrees. One-half of the population would look back up at her stern face and cry to those blue eyes with anger and indignation that she is not benevolent in the slightest, but rather cruel. The other half would look up with smiles and trembling gratitude, thanking the God for the terrible all-encompassing winter, for it's given them the strength and power to endure it, a sense of brotherhood and community with which to overcome. With even just a portion of the whole subservient, the belief in this being continues. Bedelia herself has no qualms about the inherent natures of cruelty or benevolence, but she is well-aware that humans like herself can twist definition to suit desire.

 

Hannibal has had, from the start, very peculiar definitions of desire. Their first meeting was uneventful, but spent with jovial conversation. Bedelia had felt comfortable and longed very much to ask why he'd chosen to speak with her in particular. It is not a common question asked to patients by psychiatrists, because of the innately intense undertones. Why question what the patient had chosen, if the interaction has gone along so well? It would've been a terrible thing to ask, in retrospect, simply because of how plastic and fake it would be...along with the answer itself, no doubt. There was too much subtle and unspoken understanding and attraction in that first meeting alone. Bedelia did not spoil the moments.

 

\--

 

By the second session, Bedelia had done her research. It wasn't a shock to finally understand why the name Hannibal Lecter had, at first, been so familiar and yet so mysterious to her. He is an accomplished man, beyond what they might have discussed. His publications and merits are impressive, notable for the fact that she very well may have crossed his path years prior already. Is Hannibal's humility a ruse clipped onto the bespoke suit of delicately-concocted chivalry? Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't. Then again, it is blatantly obvious that he is capable of saying so much, with so very little. Like any good psychiatrist worth their salt. There is danger there, and comfort.

 

_"A busy week?"_

_"In a sense."_

_"Do you have a pastime, to find relaxation?"_

_"I cook, often. I've transferred my passion for anatomy into the culinary arts."_

_"Once a surgeon, always a surgeon. A tactician."_

_"We are tacticians by trade, Dr Du Maurier. We are tacticians by our humanity."_

_"…That is how we survive."_

 

As it turns out, surviving is not so easy. But Hannibal is a particularly keen tactician. It is exceptionally difficult for Bedelia to pin any one emotion or suspicion on it, but behind his inky eyes is something definite. There is a depth, an understanding different from her norm, and while it is curiously stoking the flame of her interest, it is also flaring in strobes of neon, caution tape, and stop signs. She would do well not to travel closeby without having her eyes wide open, mind buckled in, and nerves taut and ready for any sudden sharp twist. Looking back, it is almost like watching with rapt intensity a terrible road wreck unfold.

 

\--

 

_"Are you all right?"_

_"...Yes."_

 

She had lied to Hannibal's face with that single syllable, and watched as amused recognition flooded his maroon eyes. Like little pinpricks of blood welling at the surface of a scrape, Bedelia recognized then that she would be trapped in the deluge of scarring yet to come. She was far from fine in that moment, but Hannibal was not the man she wished to confide in. As far as she knew, the dead body that slumped supine on her office floor was as good as promise. Only a week had passed since she'd shoved her arm down a man's throat, then allowed Hannibal to delicately wash her skin of the crimson sin. Even an accomplished woman of psychiatry such as herself would be hard-pressed to recover fully in only one hundred and sixty-eight hours. Pouring something pink into a crystal flute offered Hannibal the chance to see how her painted fingertips tremble, the finest of tremors and the deepest of shame on display. He'd taken her slender shoulders into the warm grasp of his palms, gently led her to rest upon grey settee, and then poured the bubbling alcohol himself.

 

Equal and opposite, Hannibal sat aside her, and watched Bedelia watch the glass he had placed into her hands. There was absolute silence. At the bottom of the rosy-tinted liquid, she longed to find the answer to exactly where the line of professionalism must be neatly drawn, and then smudged. A single teardrop dribbled down to break the placid surface of champagne in her glass, but the rest were sopped up from her cheeks by two willing thumbs. Hannibal's touch had been so sweet, oh how she longed for a chaste amount more. She knew this is precisely what he had desired all along, but felt too powerless to dismiss his company from her home.

 

\--

 

_"It's nice when someone sees us, Hannibal. Or has the ability to see us. It requires trust. Trust is difficult for you."_

 

In that moment, she has been crouched in wait, for years now to have the perfect timing to speak those careful words. There is never quite the _perfect_ moment, but still the profession made its way out to the room air. She sat there and looked across at his strong profile, his head and gaze turned to bathe in the sunlight from the shades, like a big cat. She'd admired in that minute the perfect knot of his paisley tie, the soft texture of his collar, and the crisp lines of brown plaid suit, all the way down to matching dark socks and shoes that shine with polished elegance. Never had it been so real, so crystal clear to her, that this man is a mask. The man she had known for so many years is only a fraction of the man she knows now. And so it will continue, for the years yet to come. Is that attributed to lack of trust? Not particularly. It is in reality attributed to the inherent chemistry of the beast, where nature and nurture do not exist, and the only means of surviving is to watch the world burn on around oneself, implode on the hell one has created. That means those in connection are the disciples of the beast, those who do not understand are the unwitting ignorant, and those who perish are the sinners. Should Bedelia ever fit so neatly into one of those categories, she would be so very lucky. Unsurprisingly, life is not so simple. It never is.

 

\--

 

_"Are you hurt?"_

_"No." He paused. "Are you worried that I am?"_

_"...No."_

 

The icy veneer she'd so long tried to build became no more than a translucent, thin sheet of frost. The thicket of winter she'd once thought of raining down upon humanity had shriveled up, the ground shaken and disturbed by a beast unbound by the rules of nature and theology. All Bedelia could do was watch her roots come undone with his smile. This time, the wickedness longing to be confined, she'd smiled softly up at him. Hannibal offered her silent pardon. She said no more, and only turned away to the airplane window to her left, her exhausted eyes only remembering the very last pinkish-oranges of the setting sun behind the clouds, before she fell to slumber. Seated beside a cannibalistic serial killer, at forty-thousand feet in the air, was finally the place where she could effectively set her weary head to rest.

 

\--

 

_"Ô, Maître,_

_Que je ne cherche pas tant à être consolé qu'à consoler;_

_à être compris qu'à comprendre;_

_à être aimé qu'à aimer._

_Car c'est en donnant qu'on reçoit;_

_c'est en pardonnant qu'on est pardonné;_

_c'est en mourant qu'on ressuscite à l'éternelle vie._

_Amen."_

_"The Prayer of Saint Francis."_

_"You remind me of him, Dr. Fell."_

_"The original prayer was first published in Paris, in the early twentieth century, yet erroneously attributed to the friar from Rome from many centuries past."_

_"Precisely."_

 

Bedelia knows that. Of course she knows that much. She wouldn't be so brazen to twist a French prayer from her tongue and not expect to face Hannibal about it. She is more surprised by how smoothly the words flowed from her lips after having not recited them for years since childhood schooling. She took one last look at the Caravaggio framed and large on gilded gallery wall, eyes taking in each detail of Saint Francis sprawled in brown robe, eyes closed and head reclined in a moment of purest peace and pleasure, held at the behest of an angel's benediction. With a raise of brows and a smiling ice in her gaze, Bedelia drifts off from Hannibal's side, and leaves him to stand before the painting in silent contemplation.

 

\--

 

One minute had been the delicious taste of lemon zest and the fizz of sparkling water, the next was a taste completely opposite, warm and milky. They'd kissed so hard that teeth clattered with passion. It was not making love, it was delicately fucking. Hannibal's lean body overshadowed even the soft lights of her Florentine boudoir. How they moved from there to his bedroom was completely lost to her. All Bedelia could think is that it had gone too far. Too far past the point of no return.

 

Where there was mild ambiguity in the past, Bedelia now is distinctly on the line of sin, crossing it and stepping on it and smudging it like one of Hannibal's beautiful charcoal drawings. Worst of all is that Hannibal had felt so good, she hardly found reason to fight it. In intimate nakedness, both in their eyes and from their bodies, their flesh had grazed so sweetly together amidst those silky sheets. Hot tendrils of passion crept into everything, leaving a hazy fog in the air filled with the scent of sex and sweat, and soaps.

 

_"Hannibal," she whined._

 

The thrilling tingle of pleasure she felt while plucking with her teeth a skewered snail, is the same she'd felt just moments prior. It was the same beautiful sway into depravity she'd felt when her petite body rolled them atop the bed, and she sat up astride Hannibal's hips, breath shuddering out with pleasure as she rocked her slender waist and guided his cock into her warmth again, their lustful gazes locked to infinity as she did. He'd firmly supported her hips and thrust up to meet her, and traced lines across her skin that made her swoon. It made her feel powerful, just for those precious few minutes on the edge.

 

\--

 

But now she has come full circle. They have come full circle.

 

The scent of dinner is in the air, beautiful and piquant enough to make even the most sated stomach instantly ravenous. Bedelia herself feels rather faint and queasy, staring out across the entrée smoking hot in the centre of elaborately adorned dinner table. Flesh cooked to perfection, so tender and juicy that it falls right off the bone.

 

"Bonsoir, Dr Du Maurier," he quips, rather cheery in spite of the romantically somber lighting.

 

"...Bonsoir," she answers again, as if they are meeting again for the very first time.

**Author's Note:**

> The painting: [Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1595)](http://www.caravaggio.org/saint-francis-of-assisi-in-ecstasy.jsp), Caravaggio.
> 
> If you liked it, don't forget to leave kudos and comments. They inspire me and make me smile.
> 
> Please consider [buying me a coffee for a fic](https://ko-fi.com/murakistags)!


End file.
